Against this background of the ambiguity of terms we will focus in the workshop
on the issue of games as art. There is a tradition of artworks using games or game engines that can be traced back to the
late 1990s with positions and ludic strategies developed by Tilmann Reiff and Volker Morawe, Axel Stockburger, Margarete Jahrmann,
Bjørn Melhus, Max Moswitzer, Peter Kogler, fuchs-eckermann, and many others. These artists from Austria, Germany and Switzerland
have been showcased in exhibitions in Vienna (1998), Dortmund (2003), Völklingen (2003–2004), Aachen (2005–2006), Vaduz (2005)
and Berlin (2005–2006). Recent game art performances have been staged at University of Applied Arts and elsewhere, e.g. “Follow
the White Rabbit through the Labyrinth” (hybrid ludic collage 2022).
It is also interesting to see, that studies of games
in the German speaking countries have initially been undertaken in art colleges and the academies and only much later and
to a lesser degree in the academic context of universities. Why that is has to be discussed in the workshop. Tilman Baumgärtel
gives at least one possible explanation, when he hints that “[…] the combination of performance and moving images, sound and
music with interaction, they [the games] are a contemporary form of the ‘dream of the total art work’ […]” (2003: 101).
A workshop by the DiGRA chapter of the German-speaking countries (Florian Bettel/Univ. of Applied Arts Vienna, Mathias
Fuchs/Leuphana University Lüneburg, Margarete Jahrmann/Univ. of Applied Arts Vienna, Hartmut Koenitz/Södertörns högskola Stockholm,
Lies van Roessel/ Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, René Bauer/ZHdK – Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Kato Hiloko/University
of Zürich, Roman Kirschner/ ZHdK).
Date: June 19, 2023, 10:00–13:00
Venue: Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
For more information see:
https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/showroom/boEt3eC8MMXiAkKyU42rkR/
